from the it's-a-miracle! dept

No one's immune from careless document handling, not when a government's in charge! The ongoing war of words over the Internal Revenue Service's lackluster data retention continues, with the agency claiming emails relevant to a House investigation all simply vanished during a series of coincidental computer crashes. That these should have been backed up to hard copy (as IRS policy dictates) and backed up further by servers elsewhere has been the topic of conversation for a few weeks now, but all the posturing in the world isn't going to bring these emails back.

The UK has its own problems with keeping relevant records intact and accessible. A little over a week ago, the UK Foreign Office was asked to produce documents detailing the use of its Diego Garcia base for CIA extraordinary rendition flights. In a variation of the "computer ate my homework," the Foreign Office offered up this explanation for its failure to produce the requested records.

''Daily occurrence logs, which record the flights landing and taking off, cover the period since 2003. Though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage.''

Oh, well. It's only stuff from 2002 that's somehow too wet to recover. Out of a decade's worth of records, that's not too bad. Except that records from 2002 are exactly the records pertinent to the discussion, as indirectly acknowledged by a Foreign Office spokeswoman:

''With or without flight records we have firm assurances from the US government, as recently as December 2013, that apart from two instances of rendition through Diego Garcia in 2002 there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the UK, our overseas territories or crown dependencies with a detainee on board since September 11, 2001.''

So, if we choose to believe the "firm assurances" of the US government, 2002 would be the only year with acknowledged rendition flights, making the rest of the non-wet documents largely extraneous. Cue disbelief from pretty much everyone but the Foreign Office. First, the CIA's "torture tapes" vanish and now records on its rendition flights somehow managed to sustain very specific damage.

This variation of "Oh, you mean these records?" has prompted further disbelief and, presumably, an above-average amount of cynicism. The Foreign Office has also declared that it will (rather belatedly) remove these files from beneath the "leaking roof" and digitize them into compliance with Two-Thousand-Freaking-Fourteen.

Unlike the thoroughly destroyed tapes, wet things will dry out, provided someone makes an actual attempt to recover the files and assess the damage. The Foreign Office appears to have done none of that when first asked to turn them over. Instead, it took the word "wet" to mean "irrecoverable" until the building outrage forced it to actually send someone to take a look at the files it declared lost.

Odd how that works. Wet things becoming dry. Destroyed records suddenly becoming recoverable. The Foreign Office loses either way. There have been too many previous attempts by the UK government to cover up its involvement in some of the US's more questionable activities. This sudden about-face on missing documents only confirms that default mode is still secrecy.